I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

I remember when I started this blog, it was mainly to replace my newsletter. My spare time has diminished so in the last couple of years due to many factors that I simply did not have the time to write an essay every other week. *says while grinning* A old friend of mine calls me the Niagra Falls Wordflow Goddess, because every time I made a post on our forum or sent him a note, it turned into a mini-novel, hehe.

But I digress … I’ve been reminded on several occaisions of the consequences of posting your thoughts so freely on the internet. I’ve had to censor a few of my posts due to issues with workmates, friends, ex’s, … I think everyone loves the idea of free speech — as long as the speech isn’t anything that reflects negatively on them.

The reason I brought this up: Moporoco found my blog while surfing the net, looking up his name. We were talking about different things on my blog, and I told him about an incident that came up when I first started posting on my site. I had made an off-hand comment about a friend of mine … I had disapproved of something she had done to her boyfriend. True, while it was none of my business and I shouldn’t post gossip, I thought to myself, “this IS my site, and I can post any damned thing I want” …

My friend soon saw the post, an argument ensued, and I begrudgingly removed the offending post … to shut her up. Needless to say, we aren’t friends anymore. I find it funny that most people SAY they want you to be straight with them, but when you are you’re suddenly not their “true friend” or they get all bent out of shape because what you have to say might hurt their feelings.

… whatever …

Anyways, Jessie’s and Jeremy’s graduations went well. Had a swell time at both … cried at both, LOL. I can’t believe that my baby brother just graduated law school. He looks so grown, like a MAN. He’s not the cute little 4 year old that I remember following me around everywhere.

Memorial weekend we visited my parents and that was an adventure. My folks have an inground pool in their backyard, in fact right dab smack in the middle of my mom’s garden — she has the greenest thumb I know, mine’s black, LOL!

So Dad’s been telling Jessie for months that as soon as the pool was opened, she could come swimming over there. Needless to say, that’s all she’s talked about for the last couple of weeks. We had bought her a swimsuit with a built-in floatation device. She can dogpaddle really well, but she’s so small that she needs help floating.

Man, I’ve never seen such a quick adjustment to anything as she adapted to that water! When she first got in, she wouldn’t move and kept clinging to me, LOL!! (She was so cute!) However, about 30 minutes later, after she got over the shock and fear I guess, she was wanting to race me up and down the pool.

My brother and mom were there with us, so she played with my mom’s floats (more like a boat, it holds 2-3 people!) and used my brother as a surf board … hehe, she loved that part! When time for lunch rolled around, we had all gotten out and were ready to eat. Jeremy told me that when he tried to get her out of the pool, “she had this face” and he “thought she was going to cry”, ROFL!!! Man, she’s got him eating out of her little hand, hehehe.

We ate a lot of food and watched some racing and football. It was a pretty good time. I got into an argument with my dad though. He’s pushing me hard to find a better job. What kills me is that I cannot seem to get him to understand that the IT market here is still a bit of a black hole. He’s convinced that I can go out and get any job with my degree — my dad’s a what I call “techno no-no,” meaning that he understands very little about anything technological.

He doesn’t understand that while I spent nearly 10 years as a programmer, I specialized only in the field of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Those opportunities aren’t really available anymore due to outsourcing and little-to-no demand. When I left Macess, I missed the job itself, but I learned a year or so ago that I would have been laid off or moved to a position I did not want because upper management had already planned to start outsourcing all of our OCR programming and maintenance. My last supervisor had wanted me to be a trainer — a job I absolutely loathed. The hours/days were horrid, and I hated travelling with the Project Managers.

I had wanted a spot in the Web Development department. After hearing promises for over a year and seeing no results, I was forced to go elsewhere. I spent 2 years Java Scripting for CSI, but hated it. It was more of a tech support job than a programmer position, and even though I was told I would be doing some web development, it never happened either.

That’s pretty much when the bottom dropped from below me. It was at that point that my life hit several personal lowpoints. I spiraled into a personal Hell. I lost my grandfather, my fiancial independence, and almost myself. Betrayed by my fiance, I had little hope left for this world. BUT, my life did change for the better … and that is a story for another time.

And again, I digress … the job search goes on. For the meantime, I’m getting a lot of database experience with my current job. Granted, 98% of their databases are MS Access (97 even, ugh!!!) and are extremely limited when it comes to web applications. I would love to migrate everything to MySQL and move the site to PHP, but the head hauncho won’t hear of it, and my workload is currently too heavy to get a demo working in my “spare time” … oh well, I guess I’ll wait until something breaks again until I bring the issue back up. :)

It’s early … I think I’m going to head out for a walk at the Civic Center in a bit … they have a walking/jogging track that has some lovely scenery, and I need to get out of the house for a bit.